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Saw “The Odyssey” with the fam. 🍿
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Computah: Make it a link
I spent a little time with the blog last night and pulled together two new site features using Claude Cowork. The last time I experimented significantly with Claude like this was to use Claude chat to build the link log from scratch , walking it through my thinking in plain language, then copying and pasting its suggestions into the backend of the site and hitting publish. This time I used Cowork,…
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“ When you gaze long enough into Instagram , Instagram gazes back into you.”
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A friend of the blog shared the Embroidered Computer, a programmable 8-bit computer created by using a combination of magnetic and glass beads, gold wire, and traditional gold embroidery techniques to fix material elements to cotton cloth. When complete, it has the processing capacity of a 1950s mainframe computer without the modern silicon microchip. Something about this reminds me of Ellen…
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Claude is launching an AI watermark , one that users can’t opt out of (but can easily outsmart). As internet god Notopoulos wrote, “Claude’s watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI? ” More: What is an AI watermark and how do they work?
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I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee . Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.
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The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as they’ll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. It’s really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different relationship to the technical side of their hobby and all of the political and tech history behind it, and…
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Winer on the purpose of web standards : “I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren’t developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes interop much less likely. I saw the differences several times as the web standards were growing…
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I found this American Affairs article on the insidiousness of ad tech quite relevant . It focuses on foreign propagandists’ exploitation of social media, but it’s just as instructive for thinking about ad tech as tech, channel and product, and its entwinement with social media as infrastructure.
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Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”
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UW–Madison communication professor Catalina Toma argues that technology-mediated communication more often supports human connection and well-being than harms it , provided people use it intentionally.
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I watched “ Obsession ” with my teenager last night, and dare I say, I liked it as a little genre story, a morality play about romance, relationships and consent. I also enjoyed the practical horror effects.🍿
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A colleague hosted a nice discussion of the work of David Dylan Thomas, who advocates for using human-centered design concepts to bring humanity back to tech . New and novel approaches abound, especially on whether and how to let engagement metrics drive decisions on design teams.
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This is a pretty good Tiktok breaking down the historical, cultural and religious meanings invoked in the “computah” memes . An important rule of the internet: the best memes are intertextual .
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Scheduled send as alibi ? Nice try, Costanza.
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Parents wanting stakes lower than a smartphone: consider a kid-friendly Wi-Fi landline, which looks and works like an old corded phone but runs over your internet connection , giving kids the independence to get connected safely. Alternatively, get a VOIP phone through your ISP for ~$10/mo.
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Finished reading: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida 📚
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The Atlantic takes on the prevalence of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction in AI-generated writing , highlighting the semantic roles in sentence construction that differentiate ideas for clarity. Chatbots seem to like this construction, despite how clunky it sounds to the human ear.
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Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity .
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Finished reading: Yesteryear A Novel by Caro Claire Burke 📚
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rss.chat is a new, free social network service that uses RSS to create a federated social feed that looks and feels a lot like OG Twitter. See also: the launch of HyperTexting , another RSS-based app that centralizes the open web in a way that feels a little like Google Reader (complimentary).
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Clothing technology: tracing a history of pockets from ancient coin purses to tie-on pouches to today .
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A cool article from Cap Times on how language translation serves as a trust-builder for local government in an era of mistrust.
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With global temps at peak in several areas of the world, the BBC covers how critical tech infrastructure is impacted by high heat .
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If you’re looking to be depressed, see this early research from Business Insider on the social implications of GLP-1 usage and how it may impact relationships in the home and workplace .